In This Issue – Reviews

This issue features two review essays and two regular reviews. We begin with Carl Landauer’s essay on International Law’s Objects, edited by Jessie Hohmann and Daniel Joyce. Landauer comments on the book’s call for a ‘material turn’ in international law, which he ties back to earlier discussions in material culture studies. He agrees with the book editors that objects can help bring vitality to the study of international law, but suggests we might go further in ‘recruiting all of the senses [and not just the visual] in an engagement with the international legal order’. In our second review essay, Ukri Soirila and David Scott use The Art of Mooting, a guide centred on common law moot competitions (and thus not your common EJIL ‘review material’), as a springboard to engage critically with international law moot courts such as the Jessup. Drawing on their own ‘conflicted experience with mooting’, they highlight ways of using critical approaches to international law to teach mooting more effectively.

As regards the regular reviews, Mai Taha discusses Cait Storr’s International Status in the Shadow of Empire, an account of Nauru’s international legal histories, which highlights, in Taha’s words, that ‘imperialism is a process that continues to manifest itself in different ways’. Fabian Eichberger is not entirely convinced by Gus van Harten’s Trouble with Investment Protection, whose ‘sweeping critique of international investment law’ he finds rather too sweeping.